Kelly tries to capitalize on Obamacare 11/09/13

This is a comment I made on the PG on this Sunday's Jack Kelly column More lies about health care Now the president is lying about past lies.

Let's be clear what we are talking about here. The insurance policies that are being cancelled are policies that do not conform to the rules of the ACA, in that they have limited yearly or lifetime maxes, or the deductibles are out of bounds, what have you. You understand that these letters are not coming from the government, they are coming from private health insurance companies. To me it is perfectly clear the insurance companies are trying to lock customers into relatively expensive plans while the ACA website is still a mess. They are trying to take advantage of the inability of customers to shop around at this moment, trying to trap people for a year or more in a more expensive policy.

This is happening because Obama did not want to legislate the health insurance companies out of existence. But does Jack Kelly acknowledge this?

Now clearly when Obama said that if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep, he essentially had in mind the people who get their health insurance through their employer. And I believe for the most part that is still true. As I understand it, there are some employers throwing people off insurance, forcing them to get it through the ACA. I believe they will pay a penalty for having done so, not to mention as the economy gets better their employees may well move to a different job.

But the interesting thing is how extreme Mr Kelly's rhetoric is. As conservatives claim Obama is a pathological liar, it pulls the dialogue of the media outlets that actually want to report the news to the right. We should all remember the summer of 2010 when conservatives started a relentless drumbeat of how Obama hadn't done enough for the unemployed. This was echoed by the Tea Party candidates and probably could be found on Youtube if someone looked hard enough. That conservative drumbeat was commented on by the CNN's and MSNBC's, and then they tried to analyze and in so doing, legitimized it as the dominant talking point of the midterms (to be fair, Democrats failed spectacularly to offer any counter message). Now conservatives are trying to do the same thing, pull CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN to the right with their relentless and baseless propaganda.

The thing is that George W Bush claimed Iraq had WMD's, and that claim cost 4,487 American military deaths, as well as probably over 100,000 Iraq's dead. I don't see conservatives apologizing for that, I see them blaming liberals or distracting us with their complaints about Obama.